Kazbegi & the Greater Caucasus

Mount Kazbek (5,054 m) and the Gergeti Trinity Church — an emblem of Georgia's natural heritage and an anchor for the archive's geology and biodiversity materials.

The Trinity church stands on a spur below Mount Kazbek, at two thousand one hundred and seventy metres, above the village of Gergeti near Stepantsminda. Built in the fourteenth century, it remains the only cross-cupola church in Khevi; a separate bell tower of the same period stands beside it. The mountain itself is 5,054 metres by the Georgian survey of 2019, though international maps usually give 5,033.

The height was not decoration but calculation. In dangerous times the relics of Mtskheta were carried up here, under the glacier: tradition holds that the cross of Saint Nino was hidden at Gergeti when the Persians marched on Tbilisi. The church belonged to the Gergeti community, the road to it still climbs steeply, and on foot from Stepantsminda the ascent takes an hour and a half to two hours.

For Russian poets Kazbek became a commonplace, though the attributions are muddled. The Monastery on Kazbek was written by Pushkin in the autumn of 1829, on his way back from Arzrum. Which monastery he meant is disputed: the Gergeti Trinity, or the cave monastery of Betlemi far higher up, at about 3,800 metres, which the monks reached by an iron chain. Lermontov did not write about this church: in him Kazbek and the Daryal gorge run through The Demon and A Hero of Our Time as landscape and as image.

In 1988 the Soviet authorities ran a cable car up to the church and put the upper station against its very walls. The people of Stepantsminda took it as desecration and soon destroyed it. Today the church is in use, a monastery has been restored beside it, and the climb up remains the best-known walk in Khevi.